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Black Widow #1

Marvel Knights was a part of the Marvel family telling stories that were of a more adult nature. Not that they necessarily used adult language or had excessive violence just for the hell of it but if it ended up suiting the story then they would include it. It’s been a couple years since they discontinued the line mainly because the types of stories that were told in the Marvel Knights line were being told in the regular Marvel line of comics so why have the special imprint that would appeal to a small audience?

I decided to check out issue 1 of Black Widow. You would think that they couldn’t really screw up a Black Widow story too bad. And with that you would be wrong. The first issue hints at a possible story but doesn’t get around to actually setting it up. Women are being killed around the country. Somehow Black Widow is involved. They reveal later that one of the women that was killed was originally from Russia like Natasha but they really don’t go into what is going on. Why they couldn’t have a simple page of set up of a premise is beyond me. While they did have a page with bad guys talking about a man that attempted to kill Natasha and failed, you never get any sort of hint as to why. You may argue that why would the writers want to reveal the main goal of the antagonists in issue one. While I agree that we don’t need to know absolutely everything that is impelling the bad guys to do what they plan on doing in the very first issue, we have to have some idea as to what is going on.

During the story, Natasha and a former colleague decide to travel to Alabama to investigate the death of one of the women. They don’t fly there because they know that bad guys could be following then so they decide to drive them to not be noticed. They arrive at a truck stop only to see a young lady, who they incidentally had passed along the side of the road earlier in the issue, get threatened by two truckers that had driven her. Natasha saves the young lady by attacking the men.All fine and good but let’s examine what was going on here. Natasha was trying to avoid being noticed so she could investigate what in the hell was going on. She did not want anyone knowing where she was. Yet she kills the two men who had threatened the young lady.

Why? If she were truly in hiding, no matter how disgusted she would have felt there was no reason for her to do what she did other than to have the writer show off that she is a good person. It was needless action that went contrary to the logic the story was trying to tell. Why would anyone trying to avoid notice kill two truckers at a truck stop with dozens of people who saw what she did? An ass kicking ginger is not someone people are going to forget people. Maybe, just maybe, she could have kicked their ass without too much of a problem from me. It still wouldn’t make much sense but you could explain it by having a panel or two where the proprietors of the truck stop talk about the two truckers being jerks and they thank her for what she did. I could live with that. I wouldn’t like it but they could work that to make it make sense. Straight up murdering their faces just made no damn sense.

The art work was the drizzling shits. A phrase an old pro wrestling announcer Jim Ross used for wrestlers who took horrible gimmicks and ended up making something out of them was that those wrestlers turned chicken shit into chicken salad. The artist here was trying to give the image of an old 70’s Grindhouse film and just didn’t accomplish what he wanted. It’s sloppy, dimensions are drawn all wrong. There was one frame of Natasha where she looked like a mutated giant. To me, the art comes across as pretentious garbage. This is someone who attempted to draw something stylish and ultimately came out with something that was complete shit. Horrible, nasty, painful shit. This hurts the eyes it is so bad. How anyone could fuck up something as simple as Natasha Romanoff. I mean, we’re talking three colors here. Black for her outfit, Caucasian for her skin color, and bright red hair. How can you fuck that up? Pablo Picasso on LSD with his hands cut off while being attacked by a pack of wild boars could have drawn a better comic here. My wife, who is a professional artist, compares this to having her eyes scratched. Painful, painful stuff.

Bottom Line:

Avoid this comic like the plague. You will find better comics in magazines at your local dentist office. This does nothing to make you care about what is happening in the story and the few times they could have drawn a decent picture to look at, they screw that up by presenting pure garbage. This is an embarrassment of a comic. Avoid it. If you find it at your local comic shop, buy it and burn it in the parking lot. It’s the type of comic that if you put it in your bird cage for your parakeet to shit on, the parakeet will fucking die. You will be a bird murderer if you do that. Do you want to kill a bird? Do you? You are so evil if you do.